“No, that’s your host family’s last name,” I said, cutting him off. The sooner he started severing mental and emotional ties with his host family, the easier it would be for him to accept who he was. “Your parents are Dylan and Eva Berling. You are a Berling.”

“Oh. Right.” He nodded, like he should know better, and then looked down at his lap. “Will I ever see my host family again?”

“Maybe,” I lied, then passed the buck so I wouldn’t have to be the one to break it to him that he’d never again see the people he’d spent the past eighteen years believing were his mom and dad. “You’ll talk about it with your real family.”

“So what’s so great about being a Berling?” Linus asked.

“Well, for starters, you’re royalty.”

“I’m royalty?” He grinned at that. Being royalty always sounded so much better than it actually was.

“Yeah.” I nodded and returned his smile. “Your father is a Markis, and your mother is a Marksinna—which are basically Kanin words for Duke and Duchess.”

“So am I a Markis?”

“Yep. You have a big house. Not quite as nice as the palace, but close. You’ll have servants and horses and cars. Your dad is best friends with the King. You’ll go to lavish parties, date the prettiest girls, and really, just live happily ever after.”

“You’re saying that I just woke up in a fairy tale?” Linus asked.

I laughed a little. “Kind of, yeah.”

“Holy crap.” He leaned his head back against the seat. “Are you a Marksinna?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m a tracker. Which is almost as far away from being a Marksinna as being human.”

“So we’re…” He paused and licked his lips. “Not human?”

“No. It’s like a lion and tiger,” I said, using my go-to analogy to explain the difference to changelings. “They’re both cats, and they have similar traits, but they’re not the same. A lion isn’t a tiger. A Kanin isn’t a human.”

“We’re still, like, the same species, then?” Linus asked, sounding relieved.

“Yep. The fact that humans and trolls are so similar is how we’re able to have changelings. We have to pass for human.”

“Okay.” He settled back in his seat, and that seemed to placate him for a few minutes, then he asked, “I get that I’m a changeling. But why am I a changeling?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t my real parents just raise me themselves?” Linus asked.

I took a deep breath. So far, Linus hadn’t asked that, and I’d been hoping he wouldn’t until we got back to Doldastam. It always sounded much better coming from the parents than it did from a tracker, especially if the changelings had follow-up questions like, Didn’t you love me? or How could you abandon your baby like that? Which were fair questions.

But since he’d asked, I figured I ought to tell him something.

“It started a long time ago, when humans had more advanced medical care and schools than we did,” I explained. “Our infant mortality rate was terrible. Babies weren’t surviving, and when they did, they weren’t thriving. We needed to do something, but we didn’t want to give up our ways completely and join the human race.

“We decided to use changelings,” I went on. “We’d take a human baby, leave a Kanin baby in its place, and then we’d drop the human baby at an orphanage.”

Other tribes brought that human baby back to the village, believing it gave them a bargaining chip with their host families if the changeling decided not to return. But that rarely happened, and we thought the insurance policy—raising a human child with intimate knowledge of our society—cost more than it was worth, so we left the human babies among other humans.

“Our babies would grow up healthy and strong, and when they were old enough, they’d come back home,” I said.

“So you guys still have crappy hospitals and schools?” Linus asked.

“They’re not the best,” I admitted. “But that’s not all of it.”

“What’s the rest?”

I sighed but didn’t answer right away. The truth was, the main reason we still practiced changelings was money.

The Kanin lived in small compounds, as far removed from human civilization as we could manage. To maintain our lifestyle, to live closer to the land and avoid the scramble of the humans’ lives with their daily commutes and their credit card debt, their pandering politicians and their wars, we refused to live among them.

We could be self-sustaining without living with the humans, but truth be told, we did love our luxuries. The only reason we ever came in contact with humans was because we wanted their trinkets. Kanin, like all trolls, have an almost insatiable lust for jewels.

Even Linus, who otherwise seemed to be an average teenage boy, had on a large class ring with a gaudy ruby, a silver thumb ring, a leather bracelet, and a chain bracelet. The only human man I’d ever seen adorn himself with as much jewelry and accessories as a troll was Johnny Depp, and based on his looks, I’d grown to suspect that he might actually be Trylle.

That’s where changelings came in. We’d place the Kanin babies with some of the wealthiest families we could find. Not quite royalty or celebrity status, but enough to be sure they’d leave hefty trust funds for their children.